The IGDA has announced the results of the Board election. I made it onto the Board, along with Wendy Despain, David Edery, Jane Pinckard, and returning member Coray Seifert.
I thank those of you who voted for me for your support, and I am very much looking forward to working with the new Board.
As for this website, I hope to continue using it to update IGDA members on what I’m doing as your representative. Stay tuned!
I’m pleased to report that the IGDA has enacted Bylaw amendments that I helped recommend as part of the task force I belonged to back in August.
Essentially the changes mean that the process of removing a Board member is clearer and easier. It requires a smaller quorum to occur (5% instead of 10%), and a Special Meeting of the members is now more clearly defined to be an asynchronous event happening over the Internet.
There’s more detail in the blog post, and of course you can always read the Bylaws.
(It’s official — I have been nominated and will be running for IGDA Board. Elections open soon, and that means the candidate statements go up on the IGDA website soon. Since my statement is done and submitted, I figured I would post it here. It’s based off a post I made here some months ago.)
“How will the IGDA tangibly benefit me as a developer?”
Prospective members ask this question time and time again. Often, we struggle to answer. Sometimes we mention one of our excellent Special Interest Groups to convince a developer to join, or we use IGDA events like the Leadership Forum and the Global Game Jam to show what the IGDA does for its community. Unfortunately, sometimes these groups and events alone fail to persuade potential IGDA members, and we lose the opportunity to expand our organization.
As an IGDA Board member, my number one priority will be to strengthen local chapters worldwide by making them a vital part of their local game development scene.
I’ve been an organizer of the Boston IGDA Chapter since 2006, and I became its president in April 2009. I’ve worked to grow the chapter, turning it into a force in the local community. When local developers ask me to describe the benefits of IGDA membership, I can respond with a list of tangible benefits provided by our chapter:
If every IGDA chapter worldwide could provide their members with a similar list of services, individual developers would immediately see the benefits that the IGDA brings them. Furthermore, they would see opportunities to volunteer on a local level, which would lead to greater member engagement with the IGDA.
Member engagement and communication on a chapter level are the foundation of the IGDA’s ability to advocate for game developers. Imagine if all of our chapters were strong; the IGDA could respond to hot-button QoL issues as they are raised by recommending that all of its chapters participate in a theme month, where the topic of discussion would be issues surrounding QoL. We could take notes from all the meetings worldwide and compile them on the IGDA Wiki. Such notes would be of value to the IGDA’s ongoing QoL efforts, giving the IGDA a better handle on where developers stand on the issue, and the meetings themselves would almost certainly cause volunteers to step forward and join our QoL initiatives.
I believe in the future of the IGDA — I’ve been a member since 2003 and it is obvious that we are doing more as an organization today than ever before. Yet there is much room for improvement, not just on the chapter level, but on issues of transparency, budget, and election process and policy. I’ll end this statement by encouraging you as a member to research each and every candidate on this page: it’s in your hands to elect the Board you want, so don’t throw away this opportunity to make a real difference.
Volunteer contributions:
I had originally written a long post about this, but I believe I will simply say the following:
For those members who have asked me to say something on the EDGE Games issue, I do think that I have made my position clear by supporting the petition to call a member vote on the removal of Tim Langdell from the IGDA Board of Directors. I believe that the actions of EDGE Games are not consistent with the IGDA’s mission, and I believe that Tim Langdell’s association with EDGE causes damage to the IGDA as an organization, if only because of the member dissatisfaction that it has provoked. I support the right of members to vote on this issue, and again I encourage you to consider signing the petition.
This whole issue has caused me to think more deeply about important related IGDA issues which I’ll be addressing in forthcoming posts.
Active IGDA volunteer Corvus Elrod is spearheading an effort to get 10% of the IGDA voting membership (about 1400 people) to call a special meeting of the membership to vote on whether to remove Tim Langdell from the IGDA Board of Directors. Per the IGDA Bylaws, 10% of the membership can call a vote on, well, basically anything, including the removal of a Board member. Regardless of how you feel about the Tim Langdell issue, please remember that signing the petition means that you support the membership voting on the issue — you are not saying anything about the issue itself.
Corvus has a nice writeup of his motivation for calling the vote at his blog. The form to enter your signature is available here, and you’ll need your IGDA member number which you can get by logging in here.
I encourage you to sign, provided that you’re an IGDA member with voting rights (not a free forum member, and not a discounted student member).
